Douglas Arvidson is a past winner of the WICE/Paris Transcontinental International Short Story competition. His short fiction has been published in Paris, Prague, and in literary magazines in the United States and he was recently invited to be a staff writer for the Prague Revue, a cutting-edge, online literary journal (http://bit.ly/1mMT6ZC). The novels in his fantasy series, The Eye of the Eye of Stallion, include The Face in Amber,The Mirrors of Castaway Time, and A Drop of Wizard's Blood. His new novel, Brothers of the Fire Star, was selected as a finalist in the ForeWord Reviews 2012 Book of the Year national awards and as a finalist in three categories in the 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards: Action Adventure Fiction, Historical Fiction, and Young Adult Fiction. It has become part of the pantheon of Pacific literature and is now included in school literature programs. Brothers of the Fire Star is an adventure story set in the Pacific during World War II and concerns two boys of different races and cultures who escape the island of Guam in a small sailboat when the Japanese army invades. They must then struggle to survive as they master the secrets of the ancient Pacific navigators. Appropriate for young adults as well as adult readers, Brothers of the Fire Star is available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com (http://amzn.to/1j3axVk) and Crossquarter.com. Visit the author's website: douglasarvidson.com

Monday, April 19, 2010

A Great Anniversary, a Celebration of Bad Writing

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain

When the hinge on the screen/top of my laptop broke, I had to find a place to write where I could prop it up on something. The bar/sideboard in our sitting room works fine. I think the Scotch, Bourbon, Gin, and Tequila add something to the literary mix.

We celebrated our 29th wedding anniversary on Sunday. Had a wonderful time sitting in the sun in the backyard sucking down a very(damn)good magnum of champagne from Reims, France that cost a lot of money. Then we had a flank steak that had been marinating for a couple of days, some fresh baked bread, salad, and roast potatoes and some good red wine--a Merlot, I think it was.

That was yesterday. It's now Monday morning and we both are facing reality, Terry's admittedly harsher than mine as she has a real job and I'm a writer. I haven't looked at the manuscript I'm working on in a month or more and so now I have to go back and review everything and find where my mind abandoned the creative surge. I left my precious characters hanging and now I have to reach up through the fog, find them, and lift them off their hooks.

Speaking of struggling to get it right, I got the stuff below off an Internet message that's going around:

For all lovers of good writing, here are this year's winners of the Bulwer-Lytton contest, (aka "It Was a dark and Stormy Night" Contest) run by the English Department of San Jose State University, wherein one writes only the first line of a bad novel.

10. As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the end of it.9. Just beyond the Narrows , the river widens.

8. With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description.

7. Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as he crept along the East wall: "Andre creep... Andre creep...Andre creep."6. Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back alley sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved..

5. Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it did not keep her from eking out a living at a local pet store.4. Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then penguins often do.3. Like an over-ripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with cottage cheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the hotel floor.2. Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn't know the meaning of the word "fear"'; a man who could laugh in the face of danger and spit in the eye of death -- in short, a moron with suicidal tendencies.AND THE WINNER IS...1. The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog's deception, screaming madly, "You lied!"

Two Blogs Going

I now have two blogs. One about anything I feel like writing about (douglasarvidson.blogspot.com) and the other about my new book(brothersofthefirestar.blogspot.com). I invite you to visit both. Why a blog dedicated to a book? I believe in Brothers of the Fire Star. It pretty much covers what I want to say about things; about brotherhood and courage and how bad war is for living and breathing people. It says what I want to say about how stupid it is that race and culture can keep those living and breathing people from liking each other and how necessary courage and tolerance are to our survival. In this book, my heros are two boys who have that special courage that allows them to survive against great odss. It allows them to embrace a powerful brotherhood despite the vast differences in their backgrounds. It is that courage, raw and simple, that brings them to their necessary end game. I developed this blog to describe what informed the writing of this book because I thought it might lend it some credence to my goals. In any event, I hope you enjoy the voyage you will take with Joseph and Napu as they meet their fates.